Creating a JSON Response Using Django and Python

Last Updated : 09 Aug, 2024

In Django, we can give responses to the front end in several ways. The simplest way to render a template or send a JSON response. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is widely used for data transfer between front-end and back-end and is supported by different languages and frameworks. In Django, we can easily give a JSON response to the front end. However, if you are building an API, the better option would be to use Rest Framework to give a JSON response. In this article, we will learn how to create and use Django views and return JSON responses easily.

Setting Up Django

To respond to a JSON request in Django, you should create a view that would process it and return JSON formatted data. Here's a step-by-step guide to setting up a basic Django view:

Install Django

Make sure you are starting with the Django setup in your particular project. If not, it can be installed through pip It is used for managing Python packages so that necessary packages can be installed and unnecessary ones removed.

Before installing Django make sure you have activated the virtual environment, follow this article to learn how to create a virtual environment for Django.

pip install django

Create a Django Project

Start by creating a new Django project and app if you haven’t already. You can use the following commands:

django-admin startproject myproject
cd myproject
python manage.py startapp myapp

Also, add 'myapp' to the installed app in myproject/settings.py file:

Creating a JSON Response

There are two simple ways to return a JSON response from a Django View. We can either use HttpResponse or JsonResponse classes.

1. JSON response using HttpResponse

In the views.py file, we will import json and HttpReponse and then define our view to send JSON data.

Create a view function say 'my_view'

To send json data, we must convert the Python Dictionary object into json compatible format using the Json.dumps() method. With the HttpResponse, we must set the content_type = 'application/json', this ensures that the data is being transferred in a JSON format.

import json
from django.http import HttpResponse

def my_view(request):
    data = {
        'name': 'GeeksForGeeks',
      	'startedIn': 2009,
        'city': 'Noida'
    }
    response = HttpResponse(json.dumps(data), content_type='application/json')
    return response

2. Using Django's JsonResponse Class

JSON response is actually quite simple to handle and Django has a class named JsonResponse which is used for creating JSON responses. This makes our work easier because it will handle the JSON serialization for us, and it will set the correct content type.

Instead of HttpResponse, we can import JsonResponse from django.http and pass our data to this class.

from django.http import JsonResponse

def my_view(request):
    data = {
        'name': 'GeeksForGeeks',
        'startedIn': 2009,
        'city': 'Noida'
    }
    return JsonResponse(data)

Examples

Here are a few more examples to show different use cases for JSON responses in Django:

1. Basic JSON Response: A basic example which returns a dictionary of data.

from django.http import JsonResponse

def simple_view(request):
    data = {'message': 'Hey from GeeksForGeeks!'}
    return JsonResponse(data)

2. Nested JSON Response: Returning a structure in JSON nested levels.

from django.http import JsonResponse

def nested_view(request):
    data = {
        'user': {
            'name': 'GeeksForGeeks',
            'startedIn': 2009
        },
        'address': {
            'city': 'Noida',
            'state': 'Uttar Pradesh'
        }
    }
    return JsonResponse(data)

3. JSON Response with Status Code: Get JSON response and return a specific HTTP status code.

from django.http import JsonResponse

def error_view(request):
    data = {'error': 'Resource not found'}
    return JsonResponse(data, status=404)

To send models data into Json Response you can follow this article: how to convert models data into json in Django.

Conclusion

Since Django is capable of automatically serializing objects to JSON, it is easy for developers to create JSON responses in Django by hand or with the help of JsonResponse class. Thus, by further following the points that have been discussed in this tutorial, you can simply set up Django views that will return JSON formatted data and it is crucial for building modern web applications that are communicating with front-end frameworks and APIs.